Amoy (Chinese: 廈門話; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Ē-mn̂g-ōe or Ē-mûiⁿ-ōa), also known as Amoy Min, Xiamenese or Xiamen dialect, is a Hokkien dialect spoken in Southern Fujian province (in Southeast China), in the area centered on the city of Xiamen. Amoy Min is often known by its Hokkien or Min Nan in Southeast Asia.[citation needed] It is one of the most widely researched varieties of Min Nan,[2] and has historically come to be one of the more standardized varieties.[3]

In 1842, as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, Xiamen (Amoy) was designated as a trading port. Xiamen and Gulangyu islands rapidly developed, which resulted in a large influx of people from neighboring areas such as Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The mixture of these various accents formed the basis for Amoy.

Over the last several centuries, a large number of Hoklo people from these same areas migrated to Taiwan during Dutch rule and Qing rule. Eventually, the mixture of accents spoken in Taiwan became popularly known as Taiwanese during Japanese rule. As in British and American English, there are subtle lexical and phonological differences between modern Taiwanese and Amoy; however, these differences do not generally pose any barriers to communication. Amoy speakers also spread to Southeast Asia, where it became widely known as Hokkien.

Spoken Amoy Min preserves many of the sounds and words from Old Chinese. However, the vocabulary of Amoy was also influenced in its early stages by the languages of the Minyue peoples.[5] Spoken Amoy is known for its extensive use of nasalization.

Unlike Mandarin, Amoy distinguishes between voiced and voiceless unaspirated initialconsonants (Mandarin has no voicing of initial consonants). Unlike English, it differentiates between unaspirated and aspirated voiceless initial consonants (as Mandarin does too). In less technical terms, native Amoy speakers have little difficulty in hearing the difference between the following syllables:

Amoy is similar to other Min Nan dialects in that it makes use of five tones, though only two in checked syllables. The tones are traditionally numbered from 1 through 8, with 4 and 8 being the checked tones, but those numbered 2 and 6 are identical in most regions.

Amoy has extremely extensive tone sandhi (tone-changing) rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. What an 'utterance' is, in the context of this language, is an ongoing topic for linguistic research. For the purpose of this article, an utterance may be considered a word, a phrase, or a short sentence. The diagram illustrates the rules that govern the pronunciation of a tone on each of the syllables affected (that is, all but the last in an utterance):

Like other varieties of Min Nan, Amoy has complex rules for literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters. For example, the character for big, 大, has a vernacular reading of tōa ([tua˧]), but a literary reading of tāi ([tai˧]). Because of the loose nature of the rules governing when to use a given pronunciation, a learner of Amoy must often simply memorize the appropriate reading for a word on a case by case basis. For single-syllable words, it is more common to use the vernacular pronunciation. This situation is comparable to the on and kun readings of Japanese.

The vernacular readings are generally thought to predate the literary readings; the literary readings appear to have evolved from Middle Chinese.[citation needed] The following chart illustrates some of the more commonly seen sound shifts:

Negative particle syntax is parallel to Mandarin about 70% of the time, although lexical terms used differ from those in Mandarin. For many lexical particles, there is no single standard Hanji character to represent these terms (e.g. m̄, a negative particle, can be variously represented by 毋, 呣, and 唔), but the most commonly used ones are presented below in examples. The following are commonly used negative particles:

A number of Romanization schemes have been devised for Amoy. Pe̍h-ōe-jī is one of the oldest and best established. However, the Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet has become the romanization of choice for many of the recent textbooks and dictionaries from Taiwan.